THE WISDOM ORCHARD
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Where healthy leaders grow healthy organizations.
The Day I became the Boss I Swore I'd Never Be
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And what a man named Don Karns taught me about the difference between leading and bossing
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I still remember the morning it happened. I showed up to work at UPS and everything looked the same — the package cars, the routes, the faces I'd worked alongside for years. But something fundamental had shifted overnight. My browns were traded in for a white shirt and a dark tie. I was the boss now.
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UPS was a private company in those days, and they had a strict promote-from-within policy. That meant something. It meant the people handing me the title knew my work, knew my character, and believed I had what it took. I believed it too. Maybe too much.
My assumption going in was simple and, as it turned out, completely wrong. I thought the delivery teams would want to perform at their best for me. We'd been side by side. They knew what I was made of. Surely that counted for something.
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What I didn't understand — what nobody told me and I hadn't thought to ask — was that the relationship changes the moment the title does. I didn't wake up as a colleague who got promoted. I woke up as the boss. They saw it before I did.
The relationship changes the moment the title does. I didn't wake up as a colleague who got promoted. I woke up as the boss. They saw it before I did.
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When the performance I expected didn't materialize, the frustration set in fast. And frustration, I learned, is a dangerous fuel for a new leader. It doesn't make you better. It makes you reach for the nearest available model of authority — which, in my case, was the boss I'd worked under before. The one I had quietly promised myself I would never become.
I became him anyway. I started managing through pressure and consequence. I punished those who didn't meet expectations. I became, as I came to think of it later, a hard ass. Not because I wanted to be. Because I didn't know what else to do, and the pressure to prove myself was relentless. I had always needed to be the best performer in the room. Now the room was different and I had no idea how to win in it.
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This is the part of the story that most leadership books skip over. The wreckage between the mistake and the recovery. The weeks where you know something is wrong but you don't know what to do about it, so you just do more of the thing that isn't working.
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ENTER DON KARNS
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Don was the division manager. He didn't have a lot of formal education, a fact I mention not as a footnote but as the point. Because Don Karns was one of the finest leaders I have ever encountered in forty years of working with executives, organizations, and some of the most respected thinkers in the field of leadership development. His education came from paying close attention to people, and it showed in everything he did.
Don saw what was happening with me. More importantly, he saw through it — past the bossing behavior to the person underneath. What he recognized, and what I couldn't yet name myself, was that the hard-edged managing wasn't ambition. It was anxiety. My need to outperform everybody, to be recognized, to prove I deserved the title — it had curdled into something that was costing me the very thing I was trying to earn.
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His first piece of advice was simple and it reoriented everything: go for respect, not affection.
Those five words were not a reprimand. They were a reframe. I wasn't being asked to stop caring about my drivers. I was being asked to care about them differently. Respect is a longer game than affection. It requires consistency, honesty, and follow-through. It sometimes means disappointing people in the short term for something more sustainable. Affection, I was learning, can be bought and lost overnight. Respect has to be earned — and kept.
Go for respect, not affection. Those five words were not a reprimand. They were a reframe.
Then Don gave me something to do with that philosophy. He called it talk, listen, and act. Fifteen minutes, regularly, with each of my drivers. Not a performance review. Not a check-in designed to catch problems. A genuine conversation: how can we improve your job in a way that benefits everyone?
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And then — this was the part that mattered most — I had to commit to act. If I could address something, I would. If it was beyond my authority, I would say so honestly: I can't do that, but here's what I can do. No empty promises. No deflection. Just a straight answer and a follow-through.
It sounds simple. It is not easy. Especially when you've spent weeks burning trust and you're starting from a deficit.
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THE FIRST THING THAT CHANGED
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When I started showing up differently — consistently, honestly, with genuine curiosity about their work — something shifted. Not in them. In me. I had to change first. I had to earn back what I'd damaged. And that process, uncomfortable and humbling as it was, taught me something I have carried into every leadership engagement in the forty years since.
The leader always goes first.
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Not in the sense of working harder or staying later. In the sense that the culture of a team reflects the behavior of its leader before it reflects anything else. If you want trust, you have to be trustworthy before you can expect trust back. If you want people to show up fully, you have to show up fully first. You cannot demand a response you haven't yet earned the right to expect.
Don also did something for me that went beyond the advice. He saw my self-doubt and gave me something to stand on. He helped me understand that being the best leader — not the best performer, not the hardest driver, but the best leader — was where I could put my need to excel and actually have it serve others instead of consuming them. He gave me a version of myself I could grow into rather than a set of behaviors I was supposed to perform.
I made peace, slowly, with the fact that failure didn't mean I was crap. I learned I was human. That turns out to be a prerequisite for leading other humans well.
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WHY THIS STORY BELONGS HERE
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The Wisdom Orchard exists because of stories like this one. Not because the UPS story is exceptional — it isn't. Some version of it lives in almost every leader I have ever worked with. The new supervisor who becomes the boss they swore they wouldn't be. The senior executive who still hears the voice that says they don't quite deserve the room they're in. The leader caught in disruption who keeps reaching for playbooks that no longer apply.
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What is exceptional, I've come to believe, is having a Don Karns. Someone who sees you clearly and tells you the truth with enough care that you can actually hear it. Someone who offers not just philosophy but practice — something concrete to do with the insight so it doesn't just evaporate.
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The Wisdom Orchard is my attempt to distill what that accumulation actually produced. Not a catalog of frameworks. Not a set of best practices assembled from books. But the living, tested, sometimes hard-won understanding of what actually helps people lead better — gathered from forty years of being in the room.
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It's organized around stories, because stories reach people before frameworks do and stay with them longer after. The UPS story is the first one. There are many more.
As you enter the Wisdom Orchard, think about the leader you became instead of the leader you intended to be. What was the gap — and what would it take to close it?
The Five Groves
The Wisdom Orchard is organized around five areas of leadership practice — what I call the Five Groves. Each one corresponds to one of the Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership, the framework developed by Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner over four decades of research. I've spent my career bringing these practices to life in rooms full of real leaders facing real challenges. This is what I know about each one.
Grove One: Model the Way
Leadership begins with clarity about your own values. Not the values on the wall plaque. Your actual values — the ones that show up in how you spend your time, how you treat people when you're under pressure, and what you're willing to defend when it costs you something.
Modeling the way isn't about being perfect. It's about being consistent enough that the people around you know what you stand for — and trust that you mean it. Leaders who model the way earn credibility not through title or tenure, but through the alignment between what they say and what they do.
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Grove Two: Inspire a Shared Vision
Leaders who inspire a shared vision don't just cast a compelling picture of the future — they make others feel that the future belongs to them too. That's the part most leaders miss. They confuse announcing a vision with inspiring one.
A shared vision isn't handed down. It's built together. It requires a leader who listens as much as they speak, who understands what matters to the people they lead, and who can connect the work of today to a future worth working toward.
I've watched leaders light up a room with a vision so vivid and so human that people left ready to do something they'd never attempted before. I've also watched leaders present vision statements so polished and so hollow that the room went quiet in the wrong way. The difference was never the words. It was whether the leader actually believed what they were saying — and whether the people in the room felt seen inside of it.
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Grove Three: Challenge the Process
Every significant leadership achievement I've ever witnessed involved someone who was willing to challenge the way things were being done. Not for the sake of disruption. For the sake of something better.
Challenging the process means searching for opportunities to innovate and improve — and it means being willing to experiment, take risks, and learn from the inevitable mistakes along the way. The leaders who do this best aren't reckless. They're courageous in a very specific way: they're willing to be wrong in public, to try something that might not work, and to keep going anyway.
There's a particular kind of organizational cowardice that masquerades as prudence — the endless deferral of necessary change because the timing isn't quite right or the risk feels too high. I've seen it cost organizations dearly. The leaders who challenge the process understand that standing still carries its own risks. They just happen to be slower and quieter than the risks of moving forward.
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Grove Four: Enable Others to Act
The best leaders I've ever worked with had one thing in common — they made the people around them feel capable. Not managed. Not directed. Capable.
Enabling others to act is about building the conditions for people to do their best work. It requires trust — real trust, not the kind you talk about in team meetings but the kind that shows up when you actually let someone run with something important without hovering over their shoulder. It requires collaboration — creating structures and relationships where people can accomplish together what they couldn't accomplish alone. And it requires a leader who is genuinely more interested in the success of others than in protecting their own authority.
I've spent a lot of time on ropes courses fifty feet in the air with leadership teams — literally putting people in situations where they had no choice but to depend on each other. What those experiences revealed, every single time, was that the capacity for trust and collaboration was already there. It just needed the right conditions to surface. Your job as a leader is to create those conditions every day, not just on a ropes course.
Here's Grove Five — the last one:
Grove Five: Encourage the Heart
Leadership is hard work. It's sustained over long periods of time, often without enough recognition, in the face of real setbacks and genuine uncertainty. People get tired. They lose sight of why the work matters. They wonder if anyone notices.
Encouraging the heart is the practice of making sure they know that someone does.
This isn't about throwing pizza parties or handing out certificates of appreciation. It's about genuine, specific, human recognition — the kind that tells a person not just that they did something good, but that you saw them do it and it mattered. It's about celebrating the values and the victories that remind a team who they are and what they're capable of.
In my experience, this is the practice most leaders underdevelop — not because they don't care, but because no one ever gave them permission to express it. There's a residual belief in a lot of organizations that warmth and rigor are in tension. They're not. The leaders I've watched build the strongest teams were both demanding and deeply human. They held high standards and they made sure people knew they were valued. That combination is not a contradiction. It's the whole point.